WALL: A TOWNSHIP OF MANY FACES

By Leo H. Carney

Published: January 3, 1988

WALL TOWNSHIP—
THIS Monmouth County township has a rich legacy waiting to be written about, including the settlement of its westernmost village (Allenwood) and at least two Revolutionary War heroes.

Among its 20th-century residents have been the Italian electrical engineer and inventor Guglielmo Marconi and Russell L. Schweickart, one of the Apollo 9 astronauts.

Alyce Salmon, the township's historian, said in an interview that the Old Wall Historical Society planned to do research into and organize a one-volume history.

Allenwood was first inhabited by Lenape Indians and was settled in 1668 by Anaiah Gifford, a farmer, on what is now the state-owned Spring Meadow Golf Course, part of the 3,000-acre Allaire State Park.

As early as 1750, there was a small sawmill in what also is now the state park. A foundry operated there during the Revolutionary War.

In 1822, James P. Allaire, industrialist, inventor and protege of Robert Fulton, bought the Howell Works, as the foundry was known. He developed it into a bog-iron furnace and forge operation that, by 1836, had expanded into one of the nation's earliest planned industrial communities.

Described by local historians as ''Wall's greatest claim to historical fame,'' the Village of Allaire eventually had 70 buildings and one of the first ''free schools'' for children of foundry employees.

Small schooners once sailed up the Manasquan River to take on the iron stoves, furnaces, skillets, ladles and other products of the Howell Works, known earlier as Monmouth Furnace.

James Allaire is credited with casting the brass air chamber used on Fulton's first working steamboat, the Clermont, although it is not clear if the chamber was used on the Clermont or an earlier model.

The development of cheaper coal used to fuel furnaces gave Pennsylvania ironworks an advantage over Allaire, which had to bring in coal by rail, and the 8,000-acre village was closed in 1846. James Allaire died in 1858. In the first half of the 19th century, Capt. Garret D. Wall, who had commanded infantry troops at Sandy Hook during the Revolution, was elected Governor of New Jersey but declined the honor and later was appointed United States Attorney for New Jersey by President Andrew Jackson.

Wall was elected to the United States Senate in 1834, made a Federal judge in 1848 and died in 1850.

Mrs. Salmon said that Capt. Sam Allen, for whom Allenwood is named, was more of a local hero than Wall, having secretly patrolled the backwoods and coastline during the Revolution, laying waste British troops and supply ships.

Allen's residence was burned by the British four times, Mrs. Salmon said, and he was captured three times, escaping each time. He also was well-loved for hunting the ''Pine Robbers'' who roamed the Pine Barrens murdering people and pillaging their property.

In 1851, historical references say, Wall Township was carved from the much larger Howell Township, which, in turn, was derived from Shrewsbury Township, one of the original three Central Jersey townships established in 1683 by New Jersey's General Board of Proprietors (the others were Freehold and Middletown Townships.) Until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Wall took in all coastal communities between what are now Belmar and Manasquan.

Marconi established the American Marconi Wireless Company in a southern part of the township, known as Shark River Hills. The aerial from which he is said to have sent his first trans-Atlantic signal is marked by a monument.

Marconi is believed to have lived in Shark River Hills from 1913 to 1924, after which time he joined the Radio Corporation of America.

After he left, Mrs. Salmon said, his home was occupied by the regional Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan, she said, infiltrated and manipulated Shore communities.

On the other hand, Mrs. Salmon said, part of Marconi's property also is used by the Army Signal Corps, and it was from there that the first radar signal was bounced off the moon on Jan. 10, 1946.

Mrs. Salmon said that Russell Schweickart, the Apollo 9 astronaut, no longer lived in Wall, but that his parents still did.

It is believed that when stagecoach service and coastal railroads made possible the establishment of Shore resort towns in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Wall was cut off from the beach area as individual communities independently incorporated.

The building of the Garden State Parkway and the development of local highways brought the first large numbers of new settlers from the northern part of the state in the 1950's. By the 60's, Wall began its transition from rural to semirural.